The Times Magazine 15front of a mirror, take your clothes off – and
don’t move. Just accept it, and don’t judge it.
It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.”
“I can’t do it,” Thompson says today.
“Nancy does something I’ve never done.
When I’m looking in the mirror, I’m always
trying to make myself look ‘better’ – turning
this way or that, checking out my arse, pulling
something in. Simply revealing my utter
incapacity to accept my body as it is. But in
the movie, at that point, Nancy’s body has just
given her these seconds of pure pleasure and
she is marvelling at it – not ‘it’ as it looks, but
‘it’ as it has become to her. A place she can be
happy. A place she can find genuine bliss.”
As with most women, Thompson’s
relationship with her body is complex. While
she might not be able to stand in front of
a mirror without “juggling it around a bit”
to make it more “acceptable”, she’s “pretty
relaxed” about nudity in general. “I’m totes
relaxed in a communal changing room. There
is something so relaxing about being in a
room full of naked people – like in a German
sauna. No one really takes any notice and
most of us are just vaguely normal shapes- nothing stupendous, nothing grotesque.”
One of the pieces of preparation for the
shooting of Leo Grande saw director Sophie
Hyde get Thompson and co-star Daryl
McCormack to lie on a huge sheet of paper,
draw the outlines of their bodies and then
pencil in arrows to various areas, writing their
“stories” next to them: the good and the bad.
“We had to write where we’d been hurt – both
internal and external scars – and the bits we
liked and didn’t like. The bits I didn’t like took
some time, as you might imagine – I basically
cross-hatched the whole f***ing thing – and
then talked about what we did like. I chose my
hands and my feet. I like my hands.”
Thompson holds them up – they look both
elegant and hard-worked.
“Daryl took one of my hands and said, in
this kind of wondering voice, ‘The skin is very
soft, and it moves about,’ and I thought, ‘Yep- because it’s 60 f***ing years old, that’s why
it happened. My cells stopped regenerating
before you were born.’ ”
In a world where increasingly fewer women
now keep their pubic hair – one US study
revealed that 80 per cent choose to remove
some or all of it – Thompson’s revelation of
her own pubic hair in the movie is also, madly,
significant. “I had mine off too, for a bit, and
am very cross, because it never grew back
properly. I am older now, so it’s a bit pathetic
and wispy. I’d love to have a proper bush.”
Thompson’s attitude to nudity (“ ‘Nude’ is
such a shit word, isn’t it? Is ‘naked’ better?”)
is inherited from her parents, the actors
Phyllida Law and the late Eric Thompson,
who wrote and voiced The Magic Roundabout.
“My parents were very relaxed about it, which
was regarded as weird by my schoolfriends
but I learnt to ignore that because I thought it
was stupid.”
Thompson’s attitude to sex was informed
by her parents too. She recalls that one of her
earliest moments of, for want of a better term,
sex education was hearing her parents having
sex, clearly having “a wonderful time”. And
Thompson’s ability to find fun in sexuality can
be seen in an anecdote she tells about when,
as a teenager, she was preparing for a date
and wrote a “to do” list: “1) Wash and talc
everywhere. 2) Pluck eyebrows. 3) Make-up.
4) Paint nails. 5) Shave legs.”
Her mother found the list and edited it,
replacing all the key words with “bum” so that
when Thompson found it, the list now read,
“Wash and talc BUM, pluck BUM.”
Thompson continued this joyous vibe with
her daughter, Gaia, now 21. “I wrote a booklet
for Gaia about sex when she was little and,
instead of ‘sex’, I used the word ‘shavoom’.
I thought it was friendlier and fun. It’s a hard
word, sex. It has no softness, and so much of
sex can be about softness.”
For someone starring in possibly the most
sexually explicit movie of 2022, Thompson’s
own view on what she most values about
sex is intriguingly at odds with her turn in
Leo Grande. “For me, sex is infinitely private.
The privacy is what is so sacredly erotic.”
So, once again – why has she done it?There is one thing that perhaps has not
occurred to Emma Thompson’s detractors- and, despite the national treasure status,
the Oscars, the decades-long charity work
and the international recognition, she has
them. She is regularly referred to as “luvvie”,
“mouthy”, and The Daily Telegraph once asked,
“Is this the most annoying woman in Britain?”
(Amusingly, the piece actually concluded that
she was pretty smashing but, still, the headline
remains on Google.) And that thing is this:
maybe she’s not for you?
Maybe you don’t need a liberal, humorous,
intellectual feminist who is equally as likely to
be on an Extinction Rebellion march as on the
red carpet at Cannes. Maybe you didn’t need
to grow up seeing a woman who could both
write and star in her own sketch show – 1988’s
Thompson – but also turn her hand to high
drama and Oscar-winning screenplays.
Someone both incredibly socially and
politically engaged, but also able to clown
around with her comedy peers Robbie
Coltrane, Ben Elton, Hugh Laurie and Stephen
Fry in the TV sketch show Alfresco. A clever,
witty woman who wasn’t a train wreck or a
hot mess just getting on with what she was
obviously talented at.
For myself, growing up in the Eighties
and Nineties, I know I needed her. My
sisters and I worshipped Thompson – the
largest picture on our bedroom wall, alongside
Rik Mayall and Barbra Streisand and the
Beastie Boys, was of Thompson. Back
then, which other women were doing,
well, everything?
In 2022, of course, there are now two
whole generations of women successfully
doing what Thompson alone was doing
decades ago: her direct cultural descendants
are powerhouses like Phoebe Waller-Bridge,
Sharon Horgan, Lena Dunham and Michaela
Coel – writers/actors who are equally
Clockwise from left: in Love
Actually; with her husband,
Greg Wise, and children, Gaia
Wise and Tindy Agaba; with
Anthony Hopkins in The Remains
of the Day; with Kate Winslet
in Sense and Sensibility